Preseason musings

If I were in charge of NFL football on television:

• on-demand available for any regular season or playoffs game.
• on-demand season subscriptions available for any team. So if, say, you are a Buffalo Bills fan living in New Mexico, you could watch all their games and not simply hope they play an occasional game well enough for NFL Network to rerun it (edited) later in the week.
• the on-demand versions could include enhanced content to make them tempting upgrades from the ordinary Monday Night Football or Thursday Night Football broadcasts.
• regular season announcers would be replaced by the preseason announcers, who actually talk about the game they are there to announce. It is amazing to me how awful the regular season announcers are. They talk about their own careers, about players who haven’t played in the NFL for years, about whatever gossipy scandal is in the headlines, about the other games being played… In short, they talk about anything other than the game they’re at.

The NFL does offer seasonal subscriptions, of a sort, through streaming video. But even in 2013 streaming video still sucks, and I’m not certain these are entire games or just “every touchdown.” If one enjoys watching defensive plays, “every touchdown” is not the same thing as seeing a game.

Currently reading: Sports Illustrated Blood, Sweat and Chalk: The Ultimate Football Playbook: How the Great Coaches Built Today’s Game by Tim Layden.
A nice summary history of the major plays and schemes used in modern football, starting with the old “single wing” formation and moving forward. It is really interesting, although I wish there were a bit more about the various rules changes and how that affected certain plays.

I was meant to finish up some classwork today, but instead wrote 2500 words of fun stuff. I’m not sorry. I’ll attack the classwork tonight.